Friday, May 8, 2020

Born Today May 8: Elsie Esmond


1880-1958

Actress Elsie Esmond (birth name Elsie Augusta Elizabeth Strurkow) was born on this day in Chicago. She was primarily a stage actor.  The lion's share of her career in film came during the silent era, namely in the teens. She made her motion picture debut at the age of 34 in 1914 in The Boundary Rider, an adventure flick directed by one of the very first brother teams in film: The Wharton Brothers. She and her character shared a first name and the film also features Thurlow Bergen, who she was either married to at the time or would be soon after.  All of her films made between the years 1914 and 1917 were with Wharton, the production company founded by the brothers. Probably the most well known of these is The Lottery Man (1916), which features Oliver Hardy in the drag role of "Maggie Murphy"--the film also stars Bergen as the male lead.  The last film that she made for Wharton was The Black Stork, released in early 1917.  She has two additional film credits, both dating from the 1930's.  One of them was the Oscar nominated The Royal Family of Broadway.  She was also apparently a member of the large uncredited cast of George Cukor's 1936 film Camille starring Greta Garbo. Records of her stage appearances from the 1920's show that she spent all of that decade in theatrical performance. She certainly would not be the first or last stage actor to have tried film in the era before "sound" and found it unappealing, only to return when the "talkies" arrived. She eventually returned to the mid-west and died on the 24th of August in 1958 at the age of 78.  She is buried at Forest Home Cemetery located in Cook county Illinois.




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